Lewis Hamilton: I honestly thought I'd be fighting for pole.
Ferrari's drivers had an unsuccessful qualifying in Baku. Although Charles Leclerc made it to the final, he crashed his car and missed the chance to start from pole at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix for the fifth year in a row.
Lewis Hamilton posted only the twelfth-fastest time. The seven-time world champion explained this result by saying the team sent him out for the decisive run in the second session on the wrong tyres.
Charles Leclerc (10th): “This weekend Lewis is much faster on the straights and more consistent than me in the corners. I had serious problems. Usually I come to Baku and everything goes smoothly, but unfortunately not this time.
I think I understood what was causing the problems, so before qualifying we changed the setup. As a result, the car felt better. But that lasted only until the switch to Mediums — from that moment everything went wrong. With that compound I couldn’t get into the working window, which made the task even harder.
There will be opportunities in the race, but getting back to the front will be difficult. But I’ll try to have a good Sunday after a disappointing Saturday. Usually things go the other way around in Baku for me, but I expect to turn it around.”
Lewis Hamilton (12th): “Of course I’m very disappointed. Yesterday the car handled well, and today we chose a setup that, in theory, even seemed better, but in the end…
I had good pace, we were progressing, I felt confident, I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t running into the run-off areas. It’s just that on the last attempt I had the wrong tyres.
Everyone who qualified ahead of me was on Mediums, but I used my Mediums in the second run, following the pre-planned strategy, and because of that I ended up disadvantaged.
We could have come in for a quick pit stop to change tyres, but I wasn’t the one making that call. I wanted to change tyres, but the team said they take too long to warm up or something like that. Besides, we wouldn’t have had enough time or fuel to do that. Not the best situation, but we’ll discuss it with the team.
As I said, there were a lot of positives this weekend. I genuinely thought I could fight for pole today, so this result was somewhat of a shock. But I’ll accept it and keep pushing.”
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